“Somebody asked me if thought he’d be a major league player at some point,” New York Mets GM Sandy Alderson told The Associated Press on Sunday. “I think he will play in the major leagues. That’s my guess.

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“This experiment is not going to last forever, but he’s made meaningful progress,” Alderson said of Tebow, who is at the team’s spring training camp in Port St. Lucie, Fla. “We thought he would best benefit from being in major league camp – that that would accelerate his development.”

“My goal isn’t about what’s going to happen one day,” Tebow said. “My goal is to focus on this day ... and working as hard as I can. I got into this because I love it. I’m passionate about it.”

Tebow played a total of 126 games last year for St. Lucie and Columbia, two of the Mets’ Class A teams, hitting .226 (97 for 430) with eight home runs, 52 RBIs and 50 runs scored. Should he work his way up to the majors this season, he’d likely spend some time with the Mets’ Triple-A affiliate, the Las Vegas 51s, who are a Pacific Coast League rival of the River Cats.

The River Cats host the 51s eight times this season, with four-game sets scheduled for May 21-24 and Aug. 24-27, meaning Tebow could have multiple chances to visit Sacramento.

While his baseball career has made headlines, his athletic stardom came in another sport.

Tebow was a football star at Florida. The quarterback won the Heisman Trophy as a sophomore in the 2007-08 season and played on two national championship teams. But he played in just 37 NFL games, including two in the playoffs, over three seasons and hasn’t taken a snap since 2012.

Besides baseball, he works for ESPN and the SEC Network on college football coverage.